Posted: 05/30/2005

The Longest Yard

(2005)

by Ben Beard

A pox on everyone involved.

Adam Sandler and Chris Rock head up the cast of this mind-numbing remake of the same name. Picking up the original conceit, inverting the common moral viewpoint that prisoners deserve to be in prison and those that keep them there should be valued and respected, The Longest Yard delivers a frightful reversal: the prisoners are generally nice guys repressed by vicious, club-wielding psychos.

The story begins with a moronic police chase involving Sandler and his rich girlfriend (played by Courtney Cox, one of two women in the movie). Sandler plays Paul Crewe, a washed up ex-NFL quarterback struggling with inner demons over his own past failures. Sent to prison for drunk driving and reckless endangerment (treated with gleeful nonchalance - it’s only one of the largest killers in the U.S.), Crewe discovers an ambitious warden (played by character actor James Cromwell, who doesn’t work enough) bent on producing the best prison-guard football team. Crewe offers up the idea that the guards - impossibly stocky and mean as a brood of pitbulls - should play a weak team before the season begins, to build up their confidence.

The warden then makes the most logical decision: the guards will play the prisoners. Crewe will lead the team and he has four weeks to whip them into shape. At Crewe’s side: Caretaker, (played by Chris Rock) one of his friends, who is so bad at sports, he says, “they used to pick me after the white kids.” Caretaker and Crewe, in typical movie fashion, are given free reign to pick their team. Culling from the worst of the lot, solitary confinement headcases, killers, dealers, thieves - all essentially decent folk, they assemble a rough and tumble crowd, helped by an old Heisman winner played by none other than star of the original, Burt Reynolds. (It’s hard to believe that at one time he represented the raw masculinity of the alpha male. Still, looking trim and fit at almost 70, Reynolds proves that acting does not always improve with age.)

And if all this sounds stupid, ridiculous, ”s about all there is. It all amounts to testosterone-fueled nonsense, populated by a motley crew of ex-football players, pro wrestlers, rappers, and yes, even a few actors! The cast actually does the best they can with this “script” (if that is indeed what they are calling this these days).

Shot in the MTV-style of spinning cameras at a breakneck clip, the most interesting thing about the film is its odd treatment of homosexuality. The harsh reality of prison life and its inherent power structures becomes a sort of silly game. One running joke is whether one of the inmates hasn’t been having trysts with one of the well-known queens. Where, in prison, any perceived weakness is exploited to the fullest, it seems strange that the teammates treat it with such jocularity. And sports are no great haven for minority groups; the NFL has less than a handful of out of the closet players, ridiculed by teammates and opponents alike. Then there’s the slow motion mud wrestling, with the hardened inmates laughing and smiling while rolling around in the liberating muck. And if that weren’t homoerotic enough for you, there’s phallus jokes aplenty, culminating in an extra large jock strap flying through the air. It might be an encouraging sign on the pop culture barometer, blatant homosexuality without repercussions, but as a picture of the way things are, it stinks.

Of course, the relationships all happen off screen. Caretaker and Crewe become best friends. Reynolds becomes a father figure to the team. The warden develops a strong antagonism for Crewe. The media becomes interested, and for the big game, they sell out a stadium.

The basic premise, that sports - no matter how mean, vile, or dirty - are essentially pure, and men or boys, when playing sports, grow into a team. It is this ersatz family unit that the movie tries to build on, a little society of equals. Sports, then, bring out not the worst but the best in men. Vicious bullying guards become virtuous. Murderers, rapists, drug dealers, thieves, all transformed by the power of football. Anyone who has ever played sports knows that the opposite is in fact the case: nice guys become jerks, jerks become assholes, and assholes become pricks. Sports are indeed the great leveler: everyone is equally indicted in the take no prisoners power struggle built on dominating and humiliating the other team.

In The Longest Yard, prison becomes a sort of tough guy frat house. Cool music, buff dudes, lots of exercise, great camaraderie, tons of free time. It’s only those pesky guards and their rules who ruin the fun. Romanticizing prison is bad enough, but all could and would be forgiven if the movie were funny. But it isn’t. In fact, it is shockingly unfunny, the opposite of funny, the antithesis of funny. It is mediocre sitcom unfunny. With jokes feeling at least eight or ten years old, and lazy one-liners that wouldn’t engage a four year old, the movie suffers from a crippling, unfunny malaise. Chris Rock and Adam Sandler, both funny men with plenty of fans, seems stuck in molasses. Unoriginal and uninspired, facile, puerile, and pointless, a movie made for teenage boys, by teenage boys trapped in men’s bodies, The Longest Yard amounts to little more than a colossal an uninteresting waste of time. Save your money and rent the original. At least there you can see a young Burt Reynolds bark and sneer without suffering from back pain.

Ben Beard is a film critic in Chicago.

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